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Contro ogni previsione: uno scontro navale nel Mediterraneo moderno... 527

In short, the Ottoman navy requires further inquiries, including
the minuscule events.
Countless small-scale skirmishes must have taken place during
the early modern period of the Mediterranean, most of them waiting
for scholarly attention. The present study, hence, chooses one of
them, a case from the seventeenth century Eastern Mediterranean:
Katip Çelebi (1609-1657), the notable Ottoman scientist of the sev-
enteenth century, pointed to a singular maritime incident three times
in his famous work Tuhfetu’l-Kibar fi Esfari’il-Bihar (Gift for the Gran-
dees regarding Naval Campaigns), probably the most important trea-
tise regarding the early modern Ottoman naval establishment. In the
lunar year 1043 (which corresponded to some time between 1633
and 1634), pointed Katip Celebi, a naval encounter near Kassandra
almost claimed Ottoman Grand Admiral Cafer Pasha’s life (in office
between 1632 and 1634) . Admittedly, the temporal ambiguity of the
5
event and the lacking identification of the actors concerned in Katip
Celebi’s account require clarification, which is the intention of the
present study.
This study will first briefly evaluate the Ottoman navy within the
seventeenth century Mediterranean context at the time of the grand
admiralty of Cafer Pasha. Then, a quick overlook at the admiral and
a brief chronology of the navy’s preparation for the summer cam-
paign will be provided, while the role played in the process by a Mo-
risco (Antonio de Ávalos) in the Ottoman imperial service will also be
discussed. Lastly, the pasha’s military skill as a navy commander
will be questioned with reference to the maritime engagement that
Katip Çelebi deemed so important as to emphatically remind his
readers. One general and perhaps implicit contribution of this study
is to the ‘decline’ debate in Ottoman military historiography . While
6
Ottoman receptiveness to maritime technology transfer is recon-
firmed and further evidenced within the ambit of the present article’s
arguments, the handicaps of political appointments to an imma-
nently technical job such as the grand admiralty are hereby exem-
plified, too. Thus, the aim is to contribute to European and Ottoman
military historiography via the study of a micro-scale naval battle in
the seventeenth century.

5 Kâtip Çelebi, Tuhfetu’l-Kibar fi Esfari’l-Bihar, edited by İdris Bostan, Türkiye
Bilimler Akademisi, Ankara, 2018, pp. 192, 223, 230.
6 J. Grant, Rethinking the Ottoman “Decline”: Military Technology Diffusion in
the Ottoman Empire, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, «Journal of World History»,
10, 1 (1999), pp. 179-201.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XX - Dicembre 2023
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)